The ranking of 100 assignees in this dataset shows one company clearly ahead with 387 patent families, more than double the fifth-ranked entrant’s 140. Several major oilfield service groups appear under multiple registered entity names in the underlying data, which reflects corporate restructuring rather than separate competitors. Beyond the top few names, family counts drop quickly, down to 21 for the tenth-ranked assignee, indicating a long tail of smaller filers.

Filings peaked in 2017 at 45 records and the most recent complete comparison window, 2021 to 2024, shows a 45% decline from 22 to 12. Years 2025 and 2026 should not be read as confirming a further drop, because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months and those years are still filling in. The honest read is a field that cooled meaningfully from its 2017 high, with the very latest trend still uncertain.

G01V, the geophysics and gravity surveying subclass, appears on 83.9% of the 1,369 records in scope, and E21B, earth and rock drilling, appears on 42.7%. These two classes together account for the large majority of filing activity, confirming the corpus is centred on downhole measurement hardware and drilling operations. Software-adjacent classes such as G06F, G06N and G06T each cover under 5% of records, suggesting comparatively lighter claim density around digital interpretation and AI-based processing.